Ellery Queen - Cat of Many Tails

“The Cat. Where is he? Jimmy, where is he?”

“Now stop shaking. Lying right over there. Just an alley cat. See? Look. Don’t be afraid.”

Celeste began to cry.

“It’s all over, baby.” Jimmy had his arms around her and they rocked together in a little puddle.

Wonder where they think Celeste is. Down here “helping out,” probably. Clara Barton stuff ... And is it not a battlefield? The Battle of First Avenue. After sending McKell’s Marauders out on cavalry reconnaissance, General Queen feinted with Phillips’s Corps and engaged the enemy with his Centre Str .... Ellery thought he spied the dark head of Marilyn Soames among the other heads, but then he untwisted his neck and rubbed the back of it. What was in that beer?

“Okay, Doc, okay,” the Inspector was saying. “Over here now.”

The intern stooped over Cazalis, looked up. “Who did you say this is?” he asked sharply.

“He got a hard one in the groin. I don’t want to move him till you say it’s all right.”

“This man is Dr. Edward Cazalis, the psychiatrist!”

Everybody laughed.

“Thanks, Doc,” said Detective Young, winking at the others. “We’re beholden to you.”

They laughed again.

The intern flushed. After a while he got to his feet. “Hold him up and he’ll make it. Nothing serious.”

“Upsadaisy!”

“Say, I’ll bet he was pulling a fakeroo all the time.”

“Young, you better practice up that knee action.”

“Watch him, watch him.”

He was making a strong effort to move his legs, mincing along half on his toes like a student ballet dancer, his knees not quite supporting him.

“Don’t look,” Jimmy said. “It’s not the least bit important.”

“It is. I want to. I promised my—” But then Celeste shuddered and looked away.

“Keep that street out there cleared.” The Inspector looked around. “Hold it.” The procession stopped and Cazalis seemed grateful. “Where’s Ellery?”

“Over there, Inspector.”

“Hey.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

My Wiiiiild Ir ...

The trash can clattered and rolled a few feet.

“He’s hurt.”

“Doctor!”

The intern said, “He passed out. His hand is fractured. Easy...”

Easy. Easy does it, a mere five months’ worth of sniff and dig and hunt and plot — twenty-one weeks of it; to be exact, twenty-one weeks and one day, one hundred and forty-eight days from a soft rap on the door of an East 19th Street apartment to a hard smash to a man’s head in a First Avenue alley; from Abernethy, Archibald Dudley to Phillips, Celeste, alias Sue Martin, Girl Spy; from Friday, June 3, to Saturday, October 29; point four-o-four per cent of a single year in the life of the City of New York, during which period one of the City’s numerous hatchetmen cut down the population of the Borough of Manhattan by nine lives although, to be sure, there was that little matter of the Metropol Hall panic and the rioting that followed; in the sum, however, statistical chicken feed lost in Bunyan’s barnyard, and what was all the excitement about?

Easy does it.

Easy does it, for the Cat sat in a hard chair under photographic light and he was not the tails-lashing chimera of the broken metropolitan dream but a tumbledown old man with shaking hands and an anxious look, as if he wanted to please but not quite sure what was required of him. They had found a second salmon-pink cord of tussah silk on his person and at the rear of one of the locked filing cabinets in his Park Avenue office a cache of two dozen others of which more than half were dyed the remembered blue; he had instructed them where to look and he had picked out the right key for them from the assortment in his key case. He said he had had the cords for many years; since late in 1930, when he was on a tour around the world after retiring from his obstetrical practice. In India a native had sold him the cords, representing them to be old strangling cords of thuggee origin. Later, before putting them away, he had dyed them blue and pink. Why had he saved them all these years? He looked bewildered. No, his wife had never known about them; he had been alone when he purchased them in the bazaar and he had kept them hidden afterward... His head slanted readily to their questions and he answered in a courteous way, although there were stretches when he became uncommunicative or slightly erratic. But the rambling episodes were few; for the most part he caught the pertinent past in brilliant focus, sounding quite like the Dr. Cazalis they had known.

His eyes, however, remained unchanged, staring, lenslike.

Ellery, who had come there directly from Bellevue Hospital with Celeste Phillips and Jimmy McKell, sat to one side, his right hand in a splint, listening and saying nothing. He had not yet run down; he still had a feeling of unreality. The Police Commissioner and the District Attorney were also present; and at a little past 4:30 A.M. the Mayor hurried in, paler than the prisoner.

But the grimy old man in the chair seemed not to see any of them. It was a deliberate avoidance, they all felt, dictated by a kind of tact. They knew how plausible such madmen could be.

In the main, his account of the nine murders was remarkable for its detail. Barring his few lapses from clarity, which might well have resulted from pain, confusion, emotional and physical exhaustion — had they not known what he really was — his confession was excellent.

His least satisfactory reply came in response to Ellery’s only contribution to the night’s inquisition.

When the prisoner had nearly concluded, Ellery leaned forward and asked: “Dr. Cazalis, you’ve admitted that you hadn’t seen any of these people since their infancy. As individuals, therefore, they couldn’t possibly have meant anything to you. Yet obviously you had something against them. What was it? Why did you feel you had to kill them?”

Because the conduct of the psychotic appears unmotivated only when judged in the perspective of r eality — that is, by more or less healthy minds viewing the world as it is ...

Said Dr. Cazalis.

The prisoner twisted in his chair and looked directly at the source of Ellery’s voice, although because of the lights beating on his bruised face it was plain that he could not see beyond them.

“Is that Mr. Queen?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Queen,” said the prisoner in a friendly, almost indulgent tone, “I doubt that you’re scientifically equipped to understand.”

Sunday’s morning was full-grown when they got away from the reporters. Jimmy McKell sprawled in a corner of the taxi with Celeste in his arms and in the other corner Ellery pampered his immobilized hand, looking out the window on his side not for reasons of delicacy but because he wanted to see through it.

The City looked different this morning.

Felt, smelled, sounded different.

New.

The air had a tune in it. Maybe it was the church-bells. Churches were bellowing their wares downtown and up, East Side to west. Adeste fideles! Come and get it!

In the residential sections delicatessens, bakeries, newsstands, drugstores were busy opening.

An El train went bucketing by somewhere.

A newsboy, bluepawed.

Occasionally an early riser appeared, rubbing his hands together, walking smartly.

At taxi stands cabs stood parked. Bootleg radios going. Drivers intent.

People began collecting around them.

New York was stretching.

Waking up.

New York awoke and for a week or two the ugly vision tarried. Had radio’s celebrated planetary invasion of Earth been real, people would have stood in long lines afterward to view the Martian remains and wonder at their gullibility. Now that the monster was localized in a cage, where it could be seen, heard, pinched, reported, read about, even pitied, New York queued up. The clarity of hindsight engaged the facts of postmortem and out of it came citywide conversation pieces in shame, a safe and even enjoyable exercise for all. The Cat was merely a demented old man; and what was one lunatic against a city? File and forget; Thanksgiving was coming.